Prior art resource provisioning environments comprise provisioning systems which deliver a consumer system on request of a consumer. Such provisioning systems run provisioning tools on provisioning servers which utilize resource pools for hardware and software components by executing a pre-defined provisioning workflow from a workflow repository. Each single provisioning workflow of those prior art provisioning workflows, describes a unique target consumer system topology plus the rules how to build the consumer system from the provisioning resources. Utilizing different approaches to provision a certain unique consumer system in an optimized way requires pre-defined variations of the provisioning workflow.
Resource provisioning response time (“request-to-deliver”) is an important differentiating feature for cloud resource providers. Pre-defined prior art provisioning workflows cannot be adapted to the fastest provisioning method at run-time. Instead, a high volume of pre-defined provisioning workflow variations for the same target consumer system topology have to be developed. Further, runtime system conditions (e.g. network throughput) are not considered, since the provisioning workflows are pre-defined, and variations are selected on a “best-guess” basis.
In the Patent Application Publication US 2010/0153482 A1 “CLOUD-BASED AUTOMATION OF RESOURCES” by Kim et al. an IT administration workstation is disclosed, which hosts a workflow authoring application (e.g., Citrix Workflow Studio or Microsoft Visual Studio®), a console application which includes a workflow conversion engine and a management dashboard application. An IT administrator runs the workflow authoring application in conjunction with activity libraries to author a workflow composed of a collection of individual activities from the activity libraries and then test a workflow that defines provisioning or tear down of a VM host, storage area network (SAN), other network device or application services running on those VMs.
Today's resource provisioning systems execute pre-defined workflows without adapting those workflows to the circumstances at invocation time. The resource provisioning response time is an important unique or differentiating feature for cloud resource providers but not considered, yet. Just doing the provisioning job will not improve provisioning response time (static process), thus, will not offer better request-to-deliver time.